by Phoenix Grey
The Realm Between
Book 1: The Curse
PHOENIX GREY
Text copyright 2018 by Phoenix Grey
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the author.
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Dedicated to John for helping me to brainstorm the finer plot twists of this series(coming in later books).
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
PROLOGUE
EARTH - February 3rd, 2057
Energy zinged through Will as he hastily scribbled his information down on the employment documents for his new beta testing job at Radical Interactive. This was the only time he'd ever felt so much excitement from landing a job. He had walked through the large glass double doors with pep in his step, wearing his best suit. The pretty young receptionist had grinned at his overzealous enthusiasm as she had signed him in and told him to take a seat in the waiting room while he waited for the human resources representative to call him back to fill out his new hire paperwork.
This still didn't seem real to him. How many guys dreamed of working for a company like Radical Interactive, a giant in the virtual reality industry? The spaces on Radical Interactive's beta testing team were limited and coveted by aspiring graphic designers, the first step to beginning a career with the company.
Everyone started at the bottom. Whether you advanced or not depended on your skill and drive. Will had his bachelors in video game graphic design. He'd had it for three years now but had never been able to get his foot in the door with any of the gaming companies. It was a cutthroat industry, with thousands of guys just like him fighting for a tiny sliver of the pie. He had known going in that most people with degrees in video game design never actually got to work in the field. Many of his friends and family members had warned him about pursuing it as a career. Pigheaded and determined, he had ignored their cautionary advice. Two of his friends were also going to college for different aspects of video game design. He never even saw them as competition or thought about the throngs of other people he met online who were going to school for the same thing. For most of his life, he had been lucky enough. He had amazing parents who loved and supported him, great friends who always had his back and a nerdy girlfriend he had met in his character development class. Why shouldn't the gods favor him in this, too?
Right out of college, he had applied to every video game company he could think of. Why start at the bottom when he'd served his time and gotten his degree? He went straight for the jugular, putting his name in for video game graphic design jobs that required years of experience.
After a few months of rejection letters, he became more humble. Maybe it wasn't so easy to land a job in the industry after all? He thought he had an impressive portfolio, but there were admittedly others that he'd seen online that blew him away. It was clear that the world was full of amazingly talented jobless graphic designers.
His parents began to pressure him to get a job, and he eventually took on part-time work at a restaurant while he tried to beef up his portfolio to better match the competition and continue to submit his application whenever a job slot would open at one of the major gaming companies. But luck didn't seem to be on his side, and the cold reality of his folly started to creep in with all of its despair. He would likely never work for a gaming company.
Not wanting to waste his degree entirely, he went into the tech field. He didn't dislike his job, but it wasn't ideal. Few things were more frustrating than getting a service call and walking into someone's home to find that their cat had walked behind their computer and unplugged it. Were people really that lazy these days that it was easier for them to call his company than to follow a cord? The answer was yes. Unfortunately, the world he lived in was full of morons that never ceased to amaze him.
Life became stale, for lack of a better word. He settled into his droll existence, fixing computers during the day and escaping into the fantasy worlds he had wanted to help build at night. It was bittersweet everytime a new game came out. While he loved playing them, it was also a reminder of what his life should have been. How did the people who landed these jobs get in? He wondered. Did they have connections? Was his portfolio really shit and he just didn't know it? He had asked several of his friends and they'd always seemed impressed by his work. But perhaps those opinions were biased or they were just trying to be nice. He wasn't sure he cared anymore. Life hadn't dealt him the hand he had wanted, so he just had to play the cards he was given.
He still had his email notifications set up to tell him every time a new gaming job was posted, but he never had much hope when applying to them. Why would he when he knew what to expect? Form letter after form letter telling him they had found a candidate better suited for the position. He had grown numb to reading them. Half of the time, he didn't even open the emails. Why should he when the first visible line in the preview said 'Thank you for your interest. We're sorry to inform you...'
Yeah, I'm sure you're really sorry.
Radical Interactive wasn't a gaming company, which is probably why they hadn't just passed over his application when it landed on their HR desk. Their target market was the education and medical industries, designing software that utilized the advanced VR systems for teaching hands-on application. That wasn't particularly exciting to Will. What was exciting was that they had mastered the most realistic rendering of items in the VR world thus far. They only promoted the best of the best graphic designers to work for them, which meant that Will had a real chance of getting his name out there if he could advance in the company.
Will was so used to getting rejection letters that he almost deleted the response email from Radical Interactive when he first saw it. He had ticked the box next to it with all of the other junk he received on a daily basis. It wasn't until right before he was about to click the delete button that he noticed the preview said 'Congratulations.'
When he opened the email, he thought his heart might burst through his ribcage. He had landed a phone interview! How exciting was that? The first time a company had even given him a chance to prove himself worthy!
The rest seemed like a dream. To be honest, Will hadn't held much hope that he'd make it all the way through the interview process. Even though Radical Interactive wasn't a gaming company, positions were still highly sought after. He nearly shit himself when they raved about his portfolio and wanted to take him on immediately. Now, he was finally going to get a shot at his dream.
He zoomed through the paperwork, scribbling his name so quickly that it was barely legible on most pages. His eyes scanned over the documents, the W-9 and nondisclosure agreements and all the other red tape that comes with starting a new job. He'd seen similar forms many times before at other jobs he'd worked at. It wasn't until he reached the very last form that he gave pause.
If he remembered correctly, The Realm had been Radical Interactive's maiden voyage into the VRMMORPG world. Back then, the company was just a startup, and they didn't have the funds to hire the best designers in the business. The game was blocky, glitchy, and had an underwhelming response when pitted against the competition. Sales of the game never really spiked, and it was practically forgotten before it even gained ground. The company nearly went under from the failure of the project. That's when they shifted their focus to smaller applications, focusing on quality for their short educational games instead of spreading their resources thin to build a giant immersive world.
For a moment, Will was excited that they might be trying to revamp and revive the game. That was a project he'd definitely like to work on. But as he read down the paper, he realized that they weren't planning on a wide release. Instead, they were testing the game on patients with brain issues, working with the medical industry in the hopes that they could use the game to repair damaged parts of the brain to make patients whole again. Will just couldn't imagine how the blocky rendering could do anything but frustrate the people subjected to it. The gameplay videos he'd seen were less than impressive, which is why he had never bothered to pick up the game. Of course, he'd never tell them that.
"Is something wrong?" Belinda, the HR lady, asked when she noticed Will furrowing his brow. She looked curt and professional in a beige pencil skirt and a white blouse with a ruffle around the collar. Her light brown hair was pulled back into a sleek ponytail. Thick-rimmed black glasses framed her eyes in squares, giving her that sexy, demure librarian look.
"No." Will shook his head. "I was just kind of hoping you guys were going to revive The Realm." If Radical Interactive did decide to get back into the gaming industry, it would be a dream come true for him.
"Did you ever play it?" her voice rang with skepticism. Will doubted she frequently was told yes. Then again, maybe he was wrong? Most people who really wanted to work for a company researched it thoroughly, and The Realm was the very start of Radical Interactive. Whether he liked it or not, he would probably have to pick up a copy and give it a play through if he ever wanted to advance in the company. It would be a good suck up tactic if he ever got a chance to talk to the higher-ups. Surely, he could find something about the game to praise, even if it was crap.
"Did you?" He turned the question around on her, not wanting to offend.
"No. Video games aren't really my thing," she admitted with a hint of embarrassment.
I guess you don't really need to like video games to work in HR.
"I'd love to see Radical Interactive get back into video game design. Like large-scale VRMMORPGs and such," Will confessed. It certainly didn't hurt to tell her that. Besides, the company was called Radical Interactive. What was so radical about designing stuff for colleges and the medical industry? Nothing. They should have changed their name to something less cool if that's the direction they had planned on going in.
"I'm not sure if that will ever happen," Belinda said, making it obvious that she wasn't really in the know about what projects the company had planned for the future. "But I hear that The Realm is pretty cool. Have you watched any footage of it?"
"Not recently," he replied in a low voice, internally cringing at the memory of players walking through non-textured grass, swinging their unrealistic weapons at unnaturally angular monsters with pixels glitching in the background.
Will would be lying if he said his heart didn't drop a little at the thought that Radical Interactive would likely never get into real game design again. Sure, what they did helped advance the world, but it wasn't exactly a nerd's wet dream. His excitement only ebbed for a second. Maybe if he ascended the ranks, he could change that—he could convince the CEOs that it would be well worth their money to invest in another game. After all, they had one of the best design teams in the world now, and he was confident he could help to fix their wonky graphics problem.
He sighed contentedly at the idea, scrawling his name at the bottom of the paper. At the time, he had no idea what he was actually signing up for.
CHAPTER ONE
EARTH - August 15th, 2057
It was a shitty day, though that was partially Will's own fault. He had stayed up until nearly 4AM the night before playing Masterwind, a new VRMMORPG released by Phantomrealm Media, his favorite gaming company.
When he had put on the white helmet that immersed him in the fantasy world, it had felt like falling into a dream. Everything around him had faded, and he became one with the game. It was unlike anything he'd ever experienced before. The helmet gave the game access to a player's parietal lobe, allowing them to feel sensations.
Phantomreal Media wasn't the first gaming company to tap into brain manipulation, but they were the best at it so far. For the first time ever, they were introducing the sensation of feeling pain. No longer would players absentmindedly rush into combat with a foe twice their level.
Will had felt the consequences of that last night when he had tried fighting a drake with almost a dozen levels on him. A bite from the beast had sent pain pulsing up his arm like the beat of a drum, though it had reminded him more of a muscle spasm than a bite. Uncomfortable and pinching, but not unbearable. Just enough to make him take a step back and rethink his next move before charging in blindly again.
After his friends had joined in to help him defeat the drake, Will had downed a healing potion and then went on about his business. No harm, no foul.
A glutton for punishment and always one to push the boundaries, Will urged his friends to stand in a suicide circle and kill each other just to see what it would feel like. A monster could have accomplished the same, but it was a lot more fun talking shit, faking each other out, and laughing while they waited for their impending deaths.
While not everyone died at once, everyone did eventually get their turn to feel the quick blast of pain wherever they'd been struck and a draining weakness that flowed through the body before the screen faded to black and showed the prompt:
You have died.
The fact that death held some consequence besides the typical oh shit I lost my gear and respawn made the game a lot more realistic and fun.
In truth, Will spent a vast majority of his night touching things needlessly, feeling the textures of metal and cloth and wood. The coolness of water on his fingertips, though it still didn't feel wet. He even managed to convince one of his female friends to allow him to touch her boobs. That was exciting in more ways than one, feeling the muted suppleness of her flesh. It wasn't perfectly realistic, but it was pretty close. Thankfully, his character couldn't visually pop a boner without him willing it, something he wished he had more control over in the real world.
Originally, he had planned to go to bed whenever the game threw up the prompt to warn him that it was time to take a break, but Will had been having so much fun that he took the necessary fifteen-minute log out and then hopped right back in for another four hours. Unfortunately, he was so tired from playing afterward that he slept right through his alarm. When he finally did wake up, Will had half a mind to call in until he remembered that he was already skating on thin ice with his attendance thanks to calling in to watch a gaming tournament with his friends. But damn, was it ever tempting.
The thought of dragging himself out of bed and subjecting himself to eight hours of simulated open-heart surgery wasn't appealing at all, especially since he'd already been working on the same project for nearly three weeks. He was pretty sure that by the time the software was ready for release, he'd be able to perform open-heart surgery in real life. That was the purpose of the software, after all, to teach aspiring surgeons. This was giving Will a completely different type of education than he had ever expected, and he felt no closer to his goal of moving up as a graphic designer in the company, even though that's what he had to tell himself every day just to get out of bed.
He had heard through the grapevine before
landing the job that being a beta tester was boring work, but that was an understatement. Performing the same actions over and over again day in and day out made him feel like a drone. Wasn't technology advanced enough that they could just run software to test all of these simulations for flaws? He supposed he should be glad it wasn't; otherwise, he wouldn't have a job.
But there was something else disconcerting about the work. Everything was so realistic. It was like Radical Interactive had gone into an operating room with a video camera and recorded a surgery then somehow managed to put it into the game with a ridiculous amount of detail. Wearing their VR headset, it was like you were right there with a real patient. Will couldn't even imagine designing something this intricate. It was so well done that he would have been able to fool himself into thinking it was real if not for the lack of the scent of rich coppery blood that would have undoubtedly permeated the room from having an open chest cavity right in front of him.
Radical Interactive also made use of accessing the parietal lobe, though to a much lesser degree. Will had thought that years of horror movies and video games had desensitized him already, but it hadn't even begun to prepare him for this kind of realism. He could feel the smoothness of the scalpel in his hand, the way the skin gave way beneath the weight of it, creating the slightest popping sound when he pushed it in. The first time Will had run through the program, it had made him sick to his stomach having to saw through the patient's sternum to get to the still-beating heart inside. He had to take several breaks, at which he was sure his coworkers would have laughed at him had they not been immersed in the same scenario in their own private operating rooms.
But now he was used to it. Seeing blood and gore and the worst of human illness was a daily part of his life. Putting on the headset and being transformed from an aspiring video game graphic designer into a doctor. He and his co-workers jokingly called themselves doctors when they were away from the office grabbing beers. It would have been a good way to pick up girls if Will wasn't already in a relationship—a relationship that felt like it had been dying with each passing day since he'd moved away to California to take this job, leaving his friends and family in Ohio behind.
